Slashdot Mirror
Who Owns Your Social Identity?
wjousts writes "Who actually owns your username on a website? What rights do you have to use it? An IEEE Spectrum podcast reports: 'What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It's happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog's name to someone else.' And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them — and who does? — you'd learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more than they protect you."
...you could lose a gem like this one.
Or whoever has more clout: by the time this article showed up on Slashdot, Danah Boyd had already been on the phone with Tumblr's CEO, and the account had already been reinstated.
Not just money to sue. But a service whose entire revenue model is dependent on customer generated content creating ad impressions is more likely to hand an identity from someone who produces little revenue to one they think will generate more ad impressions. (So you're safer if your social identity is a big traffic generator, say like a Scoble.)
Money is a social construct, which exists by consent. So it isn't accurate to say that money will buy anything. The correct statement is that we consent to allow anything to be bought with money. When the problem is restated this way, the logical consequence is inescapable: only as long as we stand by and allow money to buy anything can it in fact buy anything. If we are not happy with a world in which things work this way, all we need to is withdraw our consent in sufficient numbers to effect change. This is the basis for the rule of law.
I would like to buy the username Anonymous Coward.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
On a similar topic, could Facebook create an account for you "on your behalf" using information acquired from other sources where the fine print said they were allowed to share it?
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-disappeared-me.html
Uh, if keeping your online identity is that important to you, then why not just buy your own domain?
What, did you think that Facebook or Twitter were obligated to keep your username intact? If you were on my system, would I be obligated to keep your username and account intact (politeness aside)?
Palm trees and 8
Big hosting companies don't care that it's counterproductive. They have policies.
Best to buy a domain name for yourself.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
With all the shit talking people do here on RMS, he's right on a lot of fundamental things. This includes his campaign against cloud services.
The only reason you would have your host rename your blog or account with no regard to you is because you are not your own host. People enter into these disgusting one sided contracts multiple times per day and then they're surprised when the party holding all the cards actually plays them. It's the definition of stupidity.
Willingly signing your rights away and then run around crying when you get shafted. Then you run crying to the politicians because now you need them to fix it, you don't care what they do but something must be done about it. And of course they seize the moment to push through whatever power grabbing measures that only go one way, ratcheting away everyone else's freedoms too with all sorts of unintended consequences.
Same reason I'll never get a damn kindle.
Liberty.
I get the feeling that you feel proud of a system where money can buy anything.
I get the feeling you feel there's actually any real-life "system" where enough money can't buy anything. It's only a matter of price, blatantness, and which things are cheaper than others.
There isn't any system where money can't corrupt, because the system is people and people have been, are, and will forever continue to be corruptible as long as people are people.
The only defense is to make government as weak/small as possible on the national Federal Government scale to make it necessary for a would-be briber to have to bribe many, many politicians & officials across the entire nation instead of a handful or one to have national effect.
The more power given to the current massive central government the more a target for corruption it becomes and the more damage that can be inflicted on the citizens, and the more power shifts to the rich political elite who have the connections and can afford to play.
This is basically just systems analysis, people! A distributed system is less vulnerable to attack at a single or even multiple points. It can also be looked at as the US Constitution representing FOSS and Liberalism/Progressivism representing closed-source proprietary software.
Hold on, hold on people! This isn't some troll/flame. Take a few moments to read and think about it.
FOSS advocates for a distributed, volunteer method of development (Constitutional democracy, checks and balances, & free-market Capitalism) whereas closed-source proprietary software advocates for a central control with closed development and no source code access, restrictive EULA's, TOS's, etc (Liberal/Progressive top-down government command-&-control, centrally-planned/controlled economy, legislation/regulation control of people's behavior).
I know I shouldn't be shocked, but it never ceases to amaze me how many times I hear and read comments from strong FOSS advocates against proprietary software using much of the same logic and many of the same arguments that invalidate Liberalism/Progressivism as viable, fair systems, yet are vocal supporters of the Left when it comes to politics and sneer at the very same logic and arguments they themselves used regarding FOSS vs closed-source proprietary software.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure?
If you provide a service to the public, whether or not you charge directly for that service, you are taking on certain moral (and in some cases legal) obligations. One of the foremost of those obligations is not to pull the rug out from under people's feet.
I always wonder if people who say "if you're not taking someone's money you don't owe them anything" apply that principle to their daily lives. Do you refuse to send birthday cards to your family unless they pay you to do it? Do you tell your friend, "sure, I'll give you a ride to the store in an hour," and then, when he calls two hours later asking where you are, laugh at him and tell him how stupid he was to think you'd help him out for free? Do you turn the other way when you see a little kid about to wander out into traffic, because hey, it's not like the little brat's going to pay you to pull him out of the way of an oncoming car? How far are you willing to go in service to this vile principle in which you claim to believe?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Ah, I see, you're talking about Libertopia Capitalism, which is this wonderful magical system which will take hold and sweep away all this corruption and power-mongering as soon as we get the eeevil gub'mint out of the way. Also, everyone gets a pony.
All right, back to reality. There is no such thing as capitalism except as it's practiced in the real world, just as there's no such thing as communism except the real-world variety (although, ironically in this context, F/OSS probably comes closer to a utopian Marxist's idea of how things ought to work than anything else ever has.) It's what happens in the real world, to real people, that counts. True believers in any economic ideology are as bad as religious fundamentalists: just as ignorant of the way the world works, just as likely to ride roughshod over people in their pursuit of the way they believe things ought to be, and just as likely to see their prophecies come to fruition.
Now go away, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
buy your own domain.
RTFA. She has-- TFA is on her own domain.. However, there are plenty of online communities one may wish to join (eg, even Slashdot) and prefer to use the same identity (e.g., login name). You have to be a member, with a name, to participate. And thus come under the control of the owners of that service.